Freezing!

-8˚C, aren’t we meant to be having global warming? All winter it’s been pretty mild. Until I decide to head up to the Peak district for a week of climbing! Then it decides to drop to -8˚C. Camping in this is fairly unpleasant. To give you an idea of what it involves it means sleeping in a full set of thermals, two of the warmest pairs of socks you have, a woolly hat and your best sleeping bag equipped with a liner to make it warmer. Even with all this you will still wake up regularly feeling chilly, every time you roll over fresh freezing air will circulate around your sleeping back making you shiver. Icicles will grow from the ceiling of the tent, only to melt and drip on you as the sun rises.

My frozen tent.

Other notable effects of these freezing conditions are that bottle of water you have and need to make your morning coffee has frozen solid. On the good side, the frozen chilli con carne I made before my departure is still frozen solid and so has lasted nicely for the last 5 days. However, the litre of orange juice I also froze is still frozen and hence undrinkable.

Stanage basking in the sun

But enough of the freezing conditions, during the day the opposite happen, as soon as the sun rises everything becomes gloriously warm. I have been heading up to Stanage, a mile long escarpment of grit stone to climb on the boulders scattered below it, an activity called Bouldering. While I have been sleeping, wrapped up in my thermals and woolly hat, up here during the day its back down to t-shirts and feeling like summer. A side effect of this weather system is the amazing sunsets which have lit the sky up blood red every evening and turned the moorland orange.

The world of climbing is very small and also very social, so it wasn’t long before I’d met some people from my local climbing wall in Guildford to try some boulder problems with. Bouldering is slightly different from regular climbing. Generally you aren’t climbing to high and your climbing is protected by a foam mat to land on when you fall off. However, the aim is generally to climb the hardest moves you possibly can, this means you generally don’t climb the boulder first time, but have to try repeatedly to get the moves right. This can take a few goes, maybe a few days, or even a few years. Obviously you can also get it right first go. So far I have managed to get quite a lot first go, some of the harder ones took me a few goes and one that I had been trying a lot last year finally got sent*. This was only to be replaced by a new project, which I have been working on for the last few days and still can’t get that last move.

Sunset

Unfortunately grit stone is a harsh medium, with holds more akin to sand paper then rock. After a few days the fact that my finger tips weren’t bleeding was a result of me being sensible and backing off every day when the skin started looking especially thin. Luckily, just down the road is some nice smooth limestone, nestled in the sunny side of the valley I was able to continue climbing and at the same time grow some skin. With Paul in up for a few days we had the opportunity to do some routes. This wasn’t a 100% pleasant experience as yesterday’s first climb was still in the shade and the rock was still freezing, maybe the icicles hanging off it should have given the game away. The result was a complete loss of feeling in the fingers, I couldn’t feel what I was holding onto and to make matters worse once at the top and in the sun they had to defrost. That sickening hot aches feeling left me immobile for a few minutes and I was very happy to abseil off the cliff.

Sunset reflecting off the moorland

Now Paul’s gone its back to the grit stone with fresh fingers and once this freezing mist has lifted it will be back to the rock. Oh, maybe one more coffee before I brave the outdoors again.

Frozen landscape

*climbing jargon for finished the boulder problem.